Writing for Digital Spaces

Assignments often feel disjointed and haphazard, much like the metal panels of Tuletornen.

Assignments

This class is designed to be flexible, meeting your needs based on your interest in digital writing and your immediate professional aspirations. Your major project throughout the semester will be creating your own website, designed to suit your personal goals for an online presence. At the same time, we’ll study theories of writing and rhetoric in digital spaces, with writing assignments throughout the semester. The descriptions below let you know what to expect for those smaller assignments.

Personal Website

For this class, you will create a website (similar to the one you’re reading now) for some topic, purpose, or issue of importance to you. Perhaps you want to create a portfolio of your creative writing or a website to advertise your skillsets that make you employable. Or maybe you want to start a group, a movement, or a brand of your own.

This project will involve a lot of work because you’re building an entire website, from the ground up, by yourself. But because you have full control over the design, content, and approach, this project will also be rewarding—you’ll end the semester with a part of the Internet that’s uniquely yours.

To keep your website design progress on-track, we’ll conduct a series of check-ins throughout the semester, with each one designed to check a different aspect of your design. These check-ins start simple and have increasingly more-complex expectations as we go. In each check-in, we will look for:

  1. CMS Setup & Site Structure — Have you installed your content management system (CMS; likely WordPress), and have you created the basic structure your site will have, including placeholder pages?
  2. Page Layouts & Functionality — Have you designed all your pages, and does your site behave as expected (does it do everything it should do)?
  3. Website Content & Aesthetics — Do the pages and posts on your site say what they’re supposed to say, and is the look and feel of your site effective?
  4. Finishing Touches & Final Review — Does your site look complete, polished, effective, and impressive? Are you proud of the work you’ve done and the content you’ve created?

Blog Posts (×15)

Each week, you will create a blog post in response to the regular texts you read for homework. These weekly blog posts serve as conversation starters, sharing your thinking with the class. Additionally, these posts give you experience creating content for the Web, with special attention to basic SEO standards.

Because your work will be publicly visible, you’ll need to think carefully about audience. Though you’ll write these posts primarily for an audience of your colleagues, anyone on the Internet can access your work. We’ll talk about who is and is not likely to see your ideas, and that awareness will help you tailor your writing. Furthermore, two tools built-in to our class website will help you practice good writing style for online publication: Search-Engine Optimization scores and Pre-Publish Checklists.

Search Engine Optimization

This class blog uses WordPress, which powers roughly one-third of all sites on the Web. It’s a particularly powerful system for hosting blogs about anything, up to and including those dreadful recipe websites we’ve all seen. Successful blogs use Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to improve the likelihood that they’ll appear near the top of search results when people look for the content on the blog.

Our class blog is no different—we want to be relevant to the discussion of digital writing, so we’re going to keep SEO at the forefront of our minds when responding to homework. The Yoast SEO plugin checks each post for readability and SEO, and you can only publish a post when it earns a “good” score for both from that plugin.

Pre-Publish Checklists

Furthermore, each post must meet basic content requirements within WordPress. For example, each post must have a featured image, and all images must include alt text for accessibility. At first, these requirements will be a frustration. Eventually, though, you’ll get in the habit of writing the way search engines expect.

All told, these are the requirements each blog post must meet:

  • Title must be ≥ 10 characters long
  • Content must be ≥ 250 words
  • Post must be assigned to 1 category (by week)
  • Post must have 2–5 tags
  • The post’s excerpt must be 120–155 characters (not words!) long
  • The text must link to at least one external page (such as the assigned reading material)
  • All links must be valid (no broken/malformatted links)
  • All images must include alt text for accessibility
  • Each post must include a featured image
  • Posts must earn “good” ratings on both readability and SEO from Yoast

Synthesis Essays (×3)

At the end of each course content module, you will write a synthesis paper. (See details on the calendars page.) The purpose of each synthesis paper is to bring together the concepts from all the readings done during that module. You’ll use the authors’ ideas to generate your own new conclusion or theory and show how the authors’ ideas support your thinking.

Objectives

By successfully completing the synthesis assignment, you will:

  • Extend course readings into a broader theoretical framework
  • Apply class discussions to your thinking
  • Synthesize significant concepts of digital writing and rhetoric
  • Practice articulating your ideas as you refine them

Procedure

Complete the following steps in order to create an effective synthesis paper:

  1. Review the recent readings and class discussions and come to a conclusion about the ideas we’ve discussed. This conclusion can be general or specific, theoretical or applied. But it must be clearly articulated. (In other words, include a strong thesis statement articulated early in your response.)
  2. Apply the content of this course to a specific issue. This is your chance to experiment with ideas and think critically about something of interest to you. If you fixate/obsess over something we’ve discussed, let that focus your work. If you see a way our discussion topics apply outside class/academia, let that motivate your response. (In other words, you’ll be given a broad direction; the narrow issue you address is yours to choose.)
  3. Make connections among the source material we’ve considered in class, as well as any other outside sources you deem relevant. This assignment is a synthesis, not an analysis, so create a cohesive whole based on your ideas.
  4. Explain your thinking in an essay (audience: classmates and instructor) that asserts your conclusion and supports it with evidence, examples, and related texts.

Topics

The synthesis papers will address these topics, in order:

  1. Digital Situationships: Our first unit didn’t introduce new concepts so much as it introduced new ways of thinking about concepts you thought you already knew. Our readings and class discussions have likely caused you to look at digital contexts, and rhetorical situations, more carefully. Given what you know now, and what you’ve learned from other authors, what becomes different when rhetoric becomes digital?
  2. Power Distribution: Our second unit complicated the traditional author/audience/genre rhetorical triangle. Our readings and discussions have likely caused you to see digital writing as situated in layered networks of authority. Given what you know now, and what you’ve learned from other authors, how do platforms distribute rhetorical agency?
  3. Public Audiences, Public Authors: Our third unit presented digital writing as an object of intentional design choices, each with ethical consequences. Our readings and discussions have likely caused you to re-evaluate the intentionality of multimodal design and the role(s) of generative AI. How are ethics and design implicated in the production of digital writing?

Textbook Chapter

At the end of the semester, you will write a chapter for Kean’s student-authored Writing in Digital Spaces textbook. Your chapter will address any specific concept discussed in class. (Think of the weekly readings, not the four-week themes.) You will create a 1,250–1,500-word text designed to help students in future sections of ENG 3080 learn the relevant material and apply it to the world around them.

Your chapter will include section headings as needed, one review question per section to help readers check their understanding, 4–5 key vocabulary terms for the book’s glossary, and 3–5 discussion questions at the end of the chapter to encourage readers to think about the chapter topics beyond what was mentioned in the book. This student-generated textbook will be published online during finals week.

Course Audit

The last of the semester’s assignments reviews your work and argues for your success in the class. If you’ve had a class with Dr. Friend before, this assignment will be familiar. In short, you will write a letter to your instructor explaining how you know you’ve achieved each of the student learning outcomes listed in the course syllabus.

Your letter to the instructor serves to audit the content of the course by identifying what does and does not directly apply to the goals stated at the outset of the semester. You will explain how the assignments you completed helped you achieve the results expected in the syllabus.